Chapter 56

56

MINA

It was hard to ignore the noises and smells coming from Sylas's side of the room, but I tried. He'd walled off whatever he was doing with a cloud of smoke, and I knew you couldn't pay me enough to go in there and see it.

But there were plenty of other things here to entertain me—like all these portraits, going back-back-back. I squatted down to thumb through them, wondering how far these assholes could traced their genealogy, when I got to a sepia-toned picture I recognized.

"No fucking way," I whispered, freeing it from the rest. It was an image of two men, shaking hands at the edge of a desert, with some old-timey columns behind them.

And one of them, I was very sure, was Royce Bannerman's dear old great-granddad.

I set the picture aside and started digging through other strata of the stacks, feeling like an archeologist myself. I didn't find Royce's relative in anything, anymore, but I found more images of the other man—quite a few .

"Sylas?" I asked, which briefly silenced the savage snarling happening behind me.

"My queen?"

"See what he knows about this man?" I said, holding the image up, without turning around.

"Of course," he said, and the sounds started right back up.